Nature & Animals Quote by Langston Hughes

Dreams aren’t framed here as fluffy aspiration; they’re treated as functional anatomy. Hughes picks a blunt, physical image - a “broken winged bird” - to insist that hope is not decoration but locomotion. Without it, life doesn’t just feel sad; it becomes structurally incapable of movement. The line works because it refuses the usual self-help vibe. It’s not “follow your passion.” It’s: without an inner horizon, you lose the very mechanism that makes endurance possible.

The subtext sharpens when you place Hughes in the Harlem Renaissance, writing as Black Americans faced entrenched segregation, economic exclusion, and routine violence. In that setting, “dreams” aren’t idle fantasies; they’re survival technology, a private assertion of future in a society designed to narrow the present. The bird image does double duty: it evokes beauty and fragility, but also the idea of migration, of leaving, of making distance - a freedom constantly promised and constantly withheld. A broken wing suggests not moral failure but injury inflicted.

Hughes also chooses “hold fast,” a phrase with a grip in it. He’s not asking for optimism; he’s calling for stubbornness. Dreams must be protected because they will be attacked: by poverty, by racism, by the slow erosion of repeated disappointment. The sentence lands like advice, but it’s really a quiet indictment: if a life can be rendered flightless, look at who keeps snapping wings.